The angular rate of motion of a craft is an essential input for all navigational and inertial guidance systems. Such systems are used conventionally for aircraft, spacecraft, ships, or missiles. The sensing of the angular rate of motion is presently accomplished by means of a gyroscope.
Gyroscopes, however, have various disadvantages. They must be built to extremely high accuracies and may have drift rates of fractions of a degree per hour. Due to the expense of building them, they are very costly; they are physically large and heavy. They must be frequently and precisely maintained, for the reason that critical movable elements, such as bearings, may change with time. They may also be damaged by even low levels of shock and vibration. This, in turn, may cause an increase of unknown size in the drift rate, occurring at unknown times.
Because gyroscopes are sensitive to the effects of shock and vibration, they frequently have heavy mounting configurations to protect them, which also are expensive.